And fourth, given the key role faith plays in our global politics today, we are equipping our diplomats with the understanding of the crucial role religion plays in the world today.

STAY TRUE TO HISTORY

To tackle this global crisis I believe we need to go further.

There are four pathways to this approach.

First, making clear the facts of history.

My father’s teaching was that to be faithful, one must pay heed to history as much as theology.

But unfortunately we see people distort history for their own divisive ends.

Like those who try to portray Christianity as a Western import in the Middle East.

Like those in some parts of India, where, despite the church having roots there since the Apostles, there have been attacks against Christians.

Like in Burma, where the Muslim Rohingha, stripped of their citizenship in 1982, remain in limbo, stateless, despite their community having lived there for over 200 years.

Like those in Pakistan, where the founding father Mohammed Ali Jinnah represented minorities in the flag with a strip of white alongside the green.

I was taught his famous words as a child: “You are free to go to your temples. You are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion, caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the State.”

Yet today those words ring hollow.

And then there are those who insist on an unbridgeable divide between Jews and Muslims.

But they forget about the Righteous Muslims, from Albania to Tunisia, who risked their lives to shelter Jews during the Holocaust.

And they ignore the fact that Jews helped the Bosnian Muslims to rebuild their lives after the Balkans war and genocide in Srebrenica.

Now in the UK we too have our challenges.

Extremists there will tell you that you cannot reconcile being British and being Muslim.

You cannot follow Islam and be loyal to the UK.

But history doesn’t support them.

Muslims have contributed to Britain for decades.

In fact, hundreds of thousands from the British Indian Army fought and fell for our country in the First World War.

And surveys have shown that British Muslims show higher levels of patriotism than the wider population.

In the US, too, you have individuals like Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer denying the place of Muslims in society.

Yet these so-called patriots ignore the founding tenets of their nation, of freedom and equality.

And that America’s founding father, Thomas Jefferson, over 200 years ago hosted an iftar at the White House and had a Quran on his bookshelf.

History is one of our most powerful tools in promoting religious freedom.

It proves that there is nothing inevitable about sectarian conflict around the world.

And I reject that there is a Muslim world and a Christian world.

There is no unbridgeable divide between Jew and Muslim, Hindu and Sikh, or indeed within religions, between Catholic and Protestant or Sunni and Shia.

Now of course there have been times in history where religious conflict has taken place.

But history shows that it is possible for these religions to live together.

So we must expose those who seek to twist history, who are neither true to the roots of their faiths or the founding principles of their nations.

NO THREAT TO IDENTITY

Our second pathway is the fact that the presence of other faiths does not threaten the identity of a religion or a state or a culture.

Time and again we see the motivation for persecution being the desire to preserve national, political or religious identity.

Internationally we need to make very clear: that the presence of other faiths doesn’t come at the expense of your own.

That, in fact, accepting and co-existing with another faith doesn’t make you less of a Muslim, a Christian, a Jew, a Hindu – it makes you more of one.

As I mentioned earlier, the fact that I grew up in a majority Christian country actually made me feel stronger in my own faith.

Sending my own daughter to a Christian convent school didn’t make her less of a Muslim.

Indeed she adapted the Lord’s prayer and made it her own by ending it ameen, instead of amen.

For me, rejection of another faith just reveals a weakness in your own.

For just as the bully bullies because he or she is insecure, so too the state, group or community suppresses because it fears a threat to its identity.

As Hillary Clinton put it after the tragic murder of US Ambassador Stevens in Libya last year.

Withstanding threats and insults are a ‘sign that one’s faith is unshakeable’.

There are countless examples of the persecution of the ‘other’ in order to protect identity.

Why did the Nazis want to exterminate Jews?

In part because they feared they polluted their purity, their Aryan identity.

Why did the communist regimes crack down on religion?

Because they wanted to eliminate all competing loyalties and remove all ideological opposition.

And why, today, do we see, in some Muslim-majority countries, extremists turning on their minorities?

Because they think it makes them stronger and more powerful in their Islamic identity to reject the other.

So once again, we need to show that acceptance of the ‘other’ proves not that you are weak, but that you are unshakeable in your identity.

BENEFITS OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

There is a third case for us to make: the benefits of religious freedom.

That quite apart from protecting minorities being the right thing to do morally, it is also the right thing to do socially, economically and politically.

Pioneering research by academics, including from here at Georgetown, has proven the link between religious freedom and a society’s ability to flourish.

In short, if people are free to believe and to worship, then they are able to make a bigger contribution to society.

A society which is religiously free attracts people who boost the economy.

Religious freedom guards against violence, extremism and social strife, all of which hold back the development of a society.

This is nothing new.

Back in the 17th century people were actually emigrating to the Netherlands for its religious freedoms and consequent economic opportunities.

Spain’s Islamic Golden Age was a period of harmony and progress; a safe haven for persecuted Jews, and therefore a space for everyone to reach their full potential.

It has long been argued that greater religious tolerance was the reason some regions of Europe surged ahead of others in terms of economic growth and trade.

And look at America. Would this nation of many races and many religions have been so successful without its founding principles of freedom, fairness and equality?

Because, ladies and gentlemen, persecution is bad for business.

In the time of the Raj, Britain knew religious tolerance fostered peace and productivity.

The Dutch when conquering the New World insisted on religious freedom in their newfound colonies.

There has been a similar realisation recently when it comes to girls’ right to an education.

Of course, giving girls this right is in itself is the right thing to do.